The American penal system has acquired an alarming rap sheet: Incarceration rates more than quadrupled from 1970 to 2005; African Americans are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites; more than five million Americans are barred from voting because of a felony conviction; and the United States incarcerates a greater proportion of its citizens than any nation in the world. Each of the three books reviewed here begins with some incantation of these daunting statistics, and from there they grapple with questions of the political causes and consequences of mass incarceration. What drives the contemporary prison boom, and how does mass incarceration in turn influence the distribution of political power, the mobilization of interest groups, and the citizenship of all those living under the ever-expanding criminal justice net?
These are politically pressing questions that, for the most part, political scientists have too often avoided. While the prison explosion has prompted a concomitant flurry of research, it is sociologists who have produced the preponderance of books on the politics of punishment, and major works from the last decade alone include Katherine Beckett's (1997) Making Crime Pay, David Garland's (2001) The Culture of Control, and Jonathan Simon's (2007) Governing through Crime. This odd disciplinary division of labor is nothing new. Sociologists and social theorists have long dominated the study of crime and punishment, drawing on the rich traditions of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault. Political science seems to have forgotten its own rich traditions of exploring the ways in which crime and punishment suffuse American political history. The rights of the accused and the limits of punishment are central dilemmas of legitimate state power, so much so that four of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights address criminal procedure and punishment. Alexis de Tocqueville, along with Gustave de Beaumont, were originally commissioned to study the penitentiary in America, not democracy, and an impressive if comparatively small group of political scientists like James Q. Wilson and Stuart Scheingold have produced accounts of crime and punishment worthy of testing, revising, and updating. Even with this political history and the present-day prison boom, political science's tools of the trade and areas of expertise—agenda setting, interest groups, electoral incentives, party competition, and especially state building—have not been widely applied in book-length examinations of the politics of punishment. Punishment remains a nascent topic in political science, and what the discipline can bring to the subject is still up for grabs.
Marie Gottschalk's The Prison and the Gallows is a great stride forward in showing what political science can contribute to the study of punishment. Gottschalk, the only political scientist of the four authors reviewed here, calls on insights from American political development and interest-group politics to identify how the carceral state expanded and why its growth did not face more political opposition.
This book makes two central arguments. The first is that even though contemporary incarceration rates are unprecedented, contemporary penal policy “has deep historical and institutional roots that predate the 1960s” (Gottschalk, p. 4). This may sound like a modest claim, but it actually challenges dominant accounts of the rise of the carceral state, which often begin no earlier than Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign and proceed to emphasize supposedly new post-1960s phenomena—an escalating crime rate, shifts in public opinion, the war on drugs, the emergence of the prison-industrial complex, changes in American political culture, and politicians exploiting law and order for electoral gain. In an ambitious historical sweep from convicts in the New World to supermax prisons, Gottschalk illustrates that fearful citizens and opportunistic political elites are nothing new; rather, “the state structures and ideologies that eventually facilitated the incarceration boom and other contours of the carceral state were built up well before the 1970s” (ibid., p. 7).
Because early American political development lacked any significant interest in creating federal- or state-level law enforcement, penal apparatuses developed in a “fitful, roundabout, and morally charged manner” (ibid., p. 42). For example, Progressive era alarm over prostitution catalyzed the professionalization of state and local police, as well as the new Federal Bureau of Investigation; Herbert Hoover's law-and-order campaigns led to the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Federal Bureau of Prisons; and alcohol prohibition led the courts to expand police search-and-seizure powers. Crusades against prostitutes, bootleggers, gangsters, and pornographers faded away, but Gottschalk shows that even short-lived law-and-order campaigns left “in their wake increasingly fortified law enforcement institutions” (p. 43). Gottschalk's historical account highlights both state structures and recurrent fits of punitive rhetoric that inured the public to greater penal development: Periodic law-and-order campaigns “habituated Americans to indulge rhetorically in a politics of moralism” (p. 41); Herbert Hoover's attack on alcohol and gangsters “furthered public acceptance of a more extensive role for the federal government in law enforcement and penal policy” (p. 63); and, in general, “the country has an anxious past” (p. 75). Some readers may find these ideological precursors less powerful than institutional ones in explaining the rise of the carceral state, but Gottschalk's history should succeed nonetheless in waking us from our “incredible amnesia” on punishment in American history and politics (p. 74).
The second and more controversial argument is that interest groups and social movements—some progressive and opposed to harsh punishment—actually facilitated the growth of the carceral state. Turning away from the usual suspects like the National Rifle Association and private prison firms, Gottschalk investigates four interest groups and social movements—the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and the anti–death penalty movement. She argues that the victims' movement helped penal hard-liners by pitting victim rights versus criminal rights in a zero-sum competition. Women's groups wanted state intervention for rape and domestic violence, which ultimately “helped facilitate the carceral state” (ibid., p. 115). The prisoners' movement gained strength through the work of black prison activists whose very prominence “helped to foreclose any role for the state in brokering a détente between offenders, their sympathizers, and the emerging victims' movement” (p. 195). Anti–death penalty groups advertised the possible innocence of the condemned while sidestepping wider questions of what constitutes justice for the guilty, and they advocated life in prison without parole while neglecting the broader implications of legitimating more incarceration even in noncapital cases.
Interest groups' perverse contribution to penal policy, however, is not the product of irresponsible activists. Through each of the four case studies, Gottschalk emphasizes how movements “were highly constrained by historical and institutional factors, and some strokes of bad luck and bad timing” (ibid., p. 14). Her trenchant analysis of the victims' movement, for example, situates crime victims within the U.S.'s weak welfare state and strong rights-based political tradition. Britain and other advanced industrialized countries answered victim groups by extending assistance through the welfare state, providing special services rather than special rights for victims. The thin U.S. welfare state left victims' groups vulnerable to exploitation in political campaigns, and the call for victims' rights made for a heavy counterweight against the claims for rights of the accused, convicted, and condemned. Gottschalk's (2000) The Shadow Welfare State explained why organized labor supported employer-mandated insurance instead of universal health insurance, and her latest book further showcases the complex constraints and sad ironies of interest-group and social-movement politics.
Throughout her original and counterintuitive analysis, Gottschalk carefully states that the examined groups “facilitated” law-and-order crusades, but it remains unclear just how much they actually accelerated contemporary carceral growth. Her focus on these interest groups prompts an important if unanswerable counterfactual: Would the carceral state be any smaller if victims' groups had demanded services rather than rights, if women's groups had resisted policing and incarceration as default tactics against rape and domestic violence, and if anti–death penalty groups had opposed excessive prison sentences as well as capital punishment? It seems unlikely that these groups hold the power to alter the electoral incentives and party politics that influence the passage of mandatory minimums, three strikes laws, and other legislation that inflates incarceration rates. These groups play little role in the drug war, yet drug offenders constitute 20% of state prisoners and 55% of federal prisoners. Further still, this interest-group account cannot explain the shifting racial targets of punishment, yet the prison boom entails a racial reversal of prisons, with prisons turning from 65% white in 1950 to 65% black or Latino in 2005. Despite these questions, The Prison and the Gallows is an extremely rich, intricate, and provocative book that reminds us of punishment's centrality in American political development.
Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America begins by asking a simple yet understudied question: “How can we understand the fabulous growth in the American penal system and its effects on the poor and minority from which prison inmates are drawn and ultimately return?” (p. 4). Western's account of the causes of mass incarceration will be familiar to many readers. In broad strokes, racial disruption and escalating crime in the 1960s, compounded by urban labor market collapse in the 1970s, compelled resentful and fearful whites to turn to Republicans for a harsher crime policy throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It is worth noting how disciplinary orientations and perspectives on power led Gottschalk and Western to different “objects” to study, even as they address related questions about what drives expansion of the penal system. Gottschalk views mass incarceration as a state-building project, and she therefore examines political elites, interest groups, social movements, and how they structure and are constrained by institutions. Western views mass incarceration as a “political project” that manifests how “state power flows along the contours of social inequality” (p. 4), and, with this insight from political sociology, he investigates race relations, economic insecurities, and how they direct state action. Different disciplinary and epistemological perspectives yield different points of departure, and read together, the two books offer a range of compelling explanations for the massive expansion of the carceral state. Future exploration may attempt to bring the two approaches into a productive dialogue and to evaluate the relative weight of the many economic, political, and social factors that they posit are at work in the phenomena they explain.
Turning from causes to consequences, Western identifies how the race, class, and gender dimensions of the prison boom affect social inequality in the labor market, in marriage, and in family life and beyond. His creative theoretical approach is to examine incarceration through a life course perspective. The life course perspective tries “to characterize a typical biography,” and it asks the likelihood that an individual will go to prison by a certain age, rather than taking snapshots of incarceration rates (Western, p. 20). To justify this perspective, Western shares an empirically validated maxim from sociologists of crime: Crime recedes with age, largely because adolescents are drawn “into the society of adults by passing through a sequence of life course states—completing school, finding a job, getting married, and starting a family” (ibid., p. 4). The author examines this maxim's flipside. While the “normal” life course is integrative, incarceration is disintegrative, effectively derailing mostly young men from the tracks toward inclusion in adult society. Views from the life course perspective are bleak, particularly for young black men with little schooling. Western calculates that 30% of black men without a college degree and 60% of black men without a high school diploma had gone to prison by their early thirties. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, he finds that incarceration reduces the level of wages, slows wage growth over the life course, and restricts pathways to better jobs. Incarceration is a key life event that “triggers a cumulative spiral of disadvantage” (p. 109), and, given its racial and class distributions, the prison boom further entrenches inequality.
If the book ended there, it would already stand as an innovative and meticulous study of the consequences of mass incarceration. Western goes on, however, to reveal how the prison boom artificially deflates our measures of inequality. Government measures of inequality—poverty rates, unemployment rates, and wage levels—are compiled from U.S. Census Bureau surveys that omit penal populations. Based on this truncated data, the white–black wage gap fell by roughly a third since the mid-1980s, but this decrease nearly disappears when the author includes the jobless and incarcerated in the computation. Taken broadly, his book suggests that scholars addressing economic, political, and social inequality must take note of the massive carceral state, seeing it along with the welfare state as an institutional force redistributing wealth and well-being among groups. To do otherwise risks producing measures and accounts of inequality that are not just incomplete but incorrect.
Western's book focuses its investigation on men, who comprise roughly 90% of all prisoners, and the author exposes imprisonment's deleterious consequences for black men in particular. Incarceration rates for black women are four times those of white women, and scholars such as Willie M. Legette (“The Crisis of the Black Male,” in Adolph Reed, Jr., ed., Without Justice for All, 1999) argue that racially disparate incarceration is too often presented as affecting only black men. Given that men constitute the vast majority of prisoners, it is not unreasonable to focus on them. However, in light of popular and political discourses about the “black male as an endangered species,” readers may want also to consider the ways in which race and gender intersect in the administration of criminal punishment, as well as the kinds of gendered attention paid to the lifelong consequences of punishment that Western painstakingly exposes.
While books like Punishment and Inequality in America call our attention to mass incarceration's submerged and invisible consequences, felon disenfranchisement received a fleeting but bright media spotlight with the presidential election of 2000. Despite this publicity, and despite the fact that voting is a cornerstone of both democracy and political science scholarship, some basic questions of felon disenfranchisement have gone unanswered until recently. Locked Out, coauthored by sociologists Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, is a milestone book for our understanding of felon disenfranchisement. Ambitious in scope, it traces the historical development of felon disenfranchisement and demonstrates its massive consequences for civic reintegration, political participation, and election outcomes.
The origins of felon disenfranchisement, Manza and Uggen find, are racial to the core. Using event history analysis of state adoption or amendment of felon disenfranchisement laws from 1850 to 2002, they find that states turned to this voting exclusion when blacks comprised a larger proportion of the state's prison population. Following the Civil War, many states restricted voting rights for criminal offenders, and the authors place felon disenfranchisement in the context of grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests designed to exclude black voters. But whereas other race-driven voting exclusions were ended, felon disenfranchisement laws stayed on the books, and their exclusionary power exploded with the racially loaded prison boom. Manza and Uggen report that the total number of the disenfranchised increased from 1.2 million in 1976 to 5.3 million in 2004, and currently more than 8% of the black voting-age population is disenfranchised (p. 253). In effect, they show an interesting historical arch—promulgation of disenfranchisement laws following the Civil War and then explosion of blacks actually disenfranchised following crime policy crackdowns of the 1980s and 1990s. This finding should be of interest not just to scholars of punishment but also to scholars of racial progress and decline over the course of American political history (e.g., see Phil Klinkner and Rogers Smith, The Unsteady March, 1999). The focus of Locked Out is on felon disenfranchisement and not racial politics at large, but the findings suggest that felon disenfranchisement might operate within a larger historical arch of race and institutions, especially political parties.
Locked Out also tackles the complicated task of estimating the political impact of felon disenfranchisement. Manza and Uggen combine estimates of the size and location of the disenfranchised population with their prospective vote choice and turnout, which are estimated by matching sociodemographic characteristics of the felon and ex-felon population with data from the Current Population Survey. Felon disenfranchisement gives “a small but clear advantage to Republican candidates,” but even these small benefits have made a difference in close presidential elections and in a handful of Senate elections (Manza and Uggen, p. 191). In the 2000 presidential election, for example, the authors estimate that Al Gore's popular vote margin would have increased from 500,000 votes to one million votes. If Florida's disenfranchised felons had been permitted to vote, with a mere 28% turnout but a 70% Democratic preference, then Gore would have won Florida by more than 80,000 votes.
Each of these three books offers a different account of how the carceral state was built, but they converge on the idea that the American penal system has become vast enough to reshape political opportunities and social inequality. Gottschalk shows that even liberal interest groups and social movements are interlinked with and sometimes exploited by usually conservative law-and-order interests; Western reveals how the prison boom distorts our measures of inequality and permanently undercuts the opportunities for already marginalized groups; and Manza and Uggen demonstrate how felon disenfranchisement changed not just the electorate but also election outcomes. These are significant contributions to our understanding of the carceral state.
As is usually the case with innovative work about understudied issues, however, these books set a research agenda by highlighting as many questions as they answer. We know little, for example, about how crime policy and the carceral state interact with other policy areas involving surveillance and detention, such as immigration policy and the “war on terror.” Extensive historical and comparative analysis has explained why the U.S. welfare state is an international “laggard,” and we need similar investigation as to why the U.S. carceral state is an international “leader.” Further still, studies of the carceral state should pursue a more synthesized theory of the interplay among institutions, race, and policymaking, as there is too much of a bifurcation between studying the causes of crime policy, on the one hand, and the consequences for blacks and Latinos, on the other. Taken together, these three books suggest that the modern prison boom has altered the American political landscape, and this important insight should only further encourage political science to investigate unanswered questions about the carceral state.
